On Friday night/Saturday morning (after 12) I thought I'd treat myself to a second meal. My poison of choice, a ready-made meal from one of the leading brand names, if not The brand name, as far as food products go, and in my humble opinion of course.

Popped the lasagne in the microwave and sat down to what I thought would be an enjoyable meal!

Horror of horrors!

The cheese and white sauce topping tasted like rubber! Not that I've ever had the pleasure of chewing on some rubber but I imagine that is what rubber would taste like. It however does not end there. Now... unfortunately for the company in question, I had home-made lasagne two nights before, compliments of a very good cook and friend of mine. Her lasagne is and I suspect always will be, out of this world! The ready-made meal however had mince in a tomato sauce that tasted nothing like mince in tomato sauce!

Mince in tomato sauce I have tasted! That was not mince in tomato sauce!!!!!

Not too long ago I, before the lasagne/mince in tomato episode, I tasted the brand's guacomole. I love avo!

Can you say ewwwww!

So, that's a double whammy for me!

It should however be said that the brand's raw food products are second to none! I will always support the store in that category but never again will I eat or purchase a ready-made meal from the brand in question.

In 1374, hundreds of people along the River Rhine compulsively danced for days at a time, swept up in a terrifying mania of mass, compulsive, dancing. The hysteria spread through north-Eastern France and the Netherlands, lasting for months. Similar "dancing epidemics" broke out over the next two centuries. The new issue of The Psychologist features a scientific look at this incredibly strange kind of hysteria. From The Psychologist:

An important clue to the cause of these bizarre outbreaks lies in the fact that they appear to have involved dissociative trance, a condition involving (among other things) a dramatic loss of self-control. It is hard to imagine people dancing for several days, with bruised and bloodied feet, except in an altered state of consciousness. But we also have eyewitness evidence that they were not fully conscious. Onlookers spoke of the dancing maniacs of 1374 as wild, frenzied and seeing visions. One noted that while ‘they danced their minds were no longer clear’ and another spoke of how, having wearied themselves through dancing and jumping, they went ‘raging like beasts over the land’ (Backman, 1952). The hundreds of possessed nuns described in chronicles, legal records, theological texts or the archives of the Catholic Inquisition were equally subject to dissociative trance (Newman, 1998; Rosen, 1968). Some may have simulated the behaviour of the demoniac as a means of eliciting positive attention (Walker, 1981), but the detailed descriptions of astute and cautious inquisitors leave little doubt that most were genuinely entranced.
How might we explain these epidemics of dissociation? Ergot could have induced hallucinations and convulsions in nuns who ate bread made from contaminated flour, but it is highly unlikely that ergotism would cause remorseless bouts of dancing (Berger, 1931). Nor is there any evidence that what the victims of mass possession ate or drank made any difference. Rather, as explained below, there are very strong indications that fearful and depressed communities were unusually prone to epidemic possession. And given that there is a well-established link between psychological stress and dissociation, this correlation is immediately suggestive of mass psychogenic illness.